REGIONALREPORT Triangle

As hostile takeovers go, WakeMed Health & Hospital Inc.’s $750 million bid to buy Raleigh rival Rex Healthcare Inc. wouldn’t raise eyebrows on Wall Street, but it’s shocking in the once genteel realm of Tar Heel health care. “Hospitals usually merge out of weakness,” says Kevin Schulman, a physician and health-care economist at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. “You’d be hard-pressed to find another example of one strong not-for-profit trying to buy another strong not-for-profit.”

Buying Rex would allow his system to consolidate services that both offer, WakeMed CEO William Atkinson says. “We can make much wiser use of resources. That’s hard to do when we all feel like we have to be on the same street corner.” There’s more to it than that. WakeMed has been slow to grow through mergers and acquisitions, leaving it vulnerable to big health insurers and surrounded by competitors. Winston-Salem-based Novant Health Inc. wants to build a hospital in western Wake, Durham-based Duke University Health System Inc. is opening clinics and physician practices across the county, and state-owned Rex — UNC Health Care bought it in 2000 — has the upper hand in Raleigh, Atkinson says. But the biggest threat could be in Pitt County, where East Carolina Heart Institute Inc. opened two years ago. Sixty percent of WakeMed’s cardiac patients come from outside Wake County, most of them from eastern North Carolina.

Skeptics question if buying Rex is a smart first step into the consolidation game. WakeMed is banking that the state budget gap will force the university system to take its offer, but $750 million won’t fill that hole. WakeMed, Atkinson says, also would pay Rex’s outstanding debt, possibly pushing the tab to more than $950 million. As Schulman says, “You would be paying a whole lot to literally do nothing more than change management at Rex. They’re not offering to build a new facility or provide new services.” Ultimately, patients would get the bill. Would the buyout benefit them? Schulman’s answer: “No.”

Rex isn’t for sale, UNC Health Care spokeswoman Jennifer James says, though the system has a fiduciary responsibility to evaluate the offer. Referring to the health-care system’s flagship — 783-bed UNC Hospitals in Chapel Hill — she adds: “Without Rex, we’re just a big, huge hospital in a small town.” In a letter to Atkinson, Thomas Ross, president of the state university system, wrote that UNC Health Care’s board of directors determined that the bid didn’t specify important sale conditions, such as the source of WakeMed’s financing. He asked for answers by June 17 or would “assume the offer is not a serious one and will deem it withdrawn.”

RALEIGH — Merck closed on its acquisition of Inspire Pharmaceuticals and plans to close the drug developer’s headquarters here by the end of the year. New Jersey-based Merck didn’t say how many of Inspire’s 175 workers would lose their jobs.

SILER CITY — Chicken processor Townsends will lay off 145 employees this month at a plant here. The company, which was purchased earlier this year by a Ukrainian billionaire, employs about 1,200 in Chatham County.

RALEIGH — INC Research will spend $232 million to acquire Cincinnati-based competitor Kendle. INC will keep its headquarters here, where it employs nearly 600. The deal will increase INC’s workforce to 5,000, up from more than 2,000.

DURHAM — Metabolon, which analyzes data for drug and consumer-products companies, plans to double its 100-employee workforce during the next two years. It employs about 85 here.

MORRISVILLE — Tekelec laid off 50 employees at its headquarters, reducing its Triangle workforce to 625. The cuts were part of a move by the telecommunications-equipment maker to trim 15% of its global workforce.

MORRISVILLE — Clinipace Worldwide bought rival contract-research organization PFC Pharma Focus of Zurich. The company says it also plans to raise $10 million or more for expansion. It says it will double its 30-employee staff by 2012.

CLAYTON — Urgent Cares of America, which operates 14 health clinics in North Carolina and Arizona, changed its name to FastMed Urgent Care. It was acquired in November by The Comvest Group, a West Palm Beach, Fla.-based private-equity company.

DURHAM — BioCryst Pharmaceuticals boosted its research-and-development budget by $5 million to work on gout medicine. This year, it borrowed $23 million against royalty payments it expects from a Japanese drug maker for a flu treatment.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK — IBM and Cisco Systems, two of the largest employers in RTP, could be cutting jobs there, though neither will confirm it. Alliance@IBM, a union that is trying to organize the Armonk, N.Y.- based computer-services company, says IBM laid off some of its 10,000 RTP employees. San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco, which makes telecommunications equipment, plans to cut $1 billion in annual expenses, but it wouldn’t say if or how many of its 4,900 RTP workers and contractors would be laid off.